TIME

10 January 2020\Class 1\Mr.Jai Ranjit

This mysterious subject had me thinking about what sort of things we will be talking about (I was secretly hoping that we’ll be talking about sci-fi, pop culture and time travel theories)

The subject aims to make us look at the world around us, observe and perceive it and think hard about the purpose of things.

The faculty mentioned some terms for us to discuss, frame (which I believe can be a period with respect to time), Sequence and Repetition. The words Speed and Pace came along during the discussion and we had a hard time establishing the difference between the two. While speed was defined as movement and increasing, we discovered that pace is simply the rate at which an action is happening. 

We were also asked about experiences where we felt isolated in time. People recollected events when they felt an instant change in the pace of time during some adventure sports.

We were told to brace ourselves for a 40-minute documentary, Chronos, which showed the passage of time. 

The first thing the which came to me after a few minutes of confusion was Ozymandias, a poem by P.B.Shelly which talks about an all-powerful, arrogant King Ozymandias, who had a grand empire in his time. But all of it was forgotten, worn down with time.  

The documentary highlighted a lot of concepts we discussed before, it had multiple shots which depicted the everchanging nature of time through nature and movement of elements like clouds and water, even the breeze danced in a frenzy of slow and fast-paced moments. 

It was a silent documentary, the only auditory stimuli we had was the dynamic soundtrack which kept jumping from an adventurous, curious beat to ominous and sometimes flatlining to nothing but silence and jumping to an upbeat tone immediately after that.

I also looked at it from the perspective of the cycle of life. It started with the Grand Canyon which used to be underwater millions of years ago, as we know all life came from the sea, there was a quick cut to a city in between portraying the concrete jungle and then going back to showing Egypt, one of the oldest civilization known to man. The next shots methodically traced their way through Greek and Roman empires, highlighting the beautiful architecture of the time. It showed modern-day Paris. At that point, I assumed that the documentary has completed its circle, but only to my surprise it made wild movements around time and followed no sequence at all. A lot of Grand Central timelapses which showed us humans flying across the floor like flies, watching it and realizing that you live in a city of around 1.5 crore I couldn’t help but feel insignificant.

• 

• 

• 

• 

It was kind of captivating to watch.

Another YouTube video recorded the history of humans but in a quirkier way.

During the discussion it was pointed out that time is also a construct and even though we are small and insignificant in this entire universe in both the terms of time and space, we still perceive and experience time differently in our unique way.

We watched a clip from Dr.Who confirming my doubts about studying time travel and pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. We can use science as a tool to aid our imagination and go crazy with some cool sounding technology and theories of our own.

We discussed the narrative of the documentary and started questioning what a narrative is, it simply is an action which can be further developed when you decide to add more to it. It can be conveyed using many things ranging from written mediums to a musical number.